Halle Berry stars in disaster movie Moonfall. In cinemas now.
Large-scale devastation specialist Roland Emmerich, famous for destroying large sections of the planet in films like Independence Day and 2012, extends his destructive purview beyond terra firma with this moon-centric disaster action flick that nevertheless also features plenty of Earth-bound destruction.
When the moon spins off its axis for unknown
reasons, it spells doom for humanity within months. Initial attempts to solve the problem go awry, and as the giant sphere gets closer and closer to the planet, it creates havoc with the tides and gravity, allowing for some classic Emmerich set-pieces.
So a disgraced former astronaut (Patrick Wilson), a Nasa bigwig (Halle Berry) and a quirky "megastructurist" (John Bradley, Sam from Game of Thrones) team up for a last-chance powerdrive to save Earth and discover the moon's longheld secrets.
Emmerich very much knows what he's doing in this arena, but this is pretty cheesy stuff even for him. It's not often you find yourself wistfully longing for the relative subtlety of a film like 2012. Plus he's clearly working with a lower budget than he's used to. There's plenty of spectacle, but some of the shots (and non-leading actors, for that matter) look cheap.
And even within the lowered expectations of this kind of movie, the dialogue is especially cliché-ridden and generally egregious. A newscaster actually says the line "Moon terror is mounting" with a straight face.
